Okanagan Nation tracking the return of sockeye to Penticton

Hundreds of salmon fry were released into the Okanagan River channel in Penticton on Thursday morning, a yearly process done by the Okanagan Nation Alliance hatchery to restore the health of the annual salmon run.

Sockeye fry will the emerge from the gravel, and then swim downstream to the first lake they encounter. For the next year, the salmon will feed and grow over winter.

Then in the following spring, their physiology will change as they get ready to swim out to the ocean.

"Sort of the inspiration for the whole program was back in the 1990s, the sockeye run was less than 3,000 and it looked like it was potentially going to become extinct," said Ryan Benson, a fisheries biologist with the Okanagan Nation Alliance.

"A lot of Nation members and a lot of elders started to raise alarm bells that we needed to intervene, otherwise we were going to lose the run."

The long-term program aims to restore the historical range of sockeye in the upper Okanagan watershed, Okanagan Lake, and Skaha Lake systems — part of the Columbia River Basin.

"That sort of experimental reintroduction started in 2004 officially, and ever since then, we've been slowly, every year, putting in hatchery fry. We're starting to see the results," Benson said.

After the fry are released, they will be caught a year later. The fish, now grown into smolt, are implanted with a tracker, to see their journey down the Okanagan, through the Columbia River and out to the Pacific Ocean.

A rotary screw trap is set out in the river and when the fish travel, they are diverted through the cone into a live well.

"We come by in the morning and check it, pull them out and process them and then send them on their way. So it's pretty benign. It's not too stressful on them," Benson said.

"We're trying to catch a small sample of those, do some measurements, and then we will plant them with passive integrated transponder tags."

The team is trying to figure out what the rate of survival is for the fish from when they leave to when they return.

"With this tagging, we can measure the survival of the adults when they come back and come up with some idea of what's the big impact," Benson said. "If we produce a million, how many of those fry are going to come back as adults? And that's a really good question to address."

Benson said overall he is happy with how the fish population is progressing.

"From what I've seen, it's looking good. A lot of our colleagues and with other agencies and even people in Washington, they're just amazed at the progress."

"We're looking into increasing the [population] range up into Okanagan Lake, which was historically there back before Okanagan dam and McIntyre dam were constructed," he added.

Last fall’s salmon run was a record low, after the heat wave, lack of rainfall, low lake levels and other environmental conditions affected fish populations.

"I believe it was two years ago, we had a record run here. And a record run in Shingle Creek. But it's just the nature of the population, it ebbs and flows."

"But I think for this coming year, if things stay on course, it looks like it'll be a pretty good run."